The Beet Truck Nobody Else Would Drive

Shane called at 5:40 that Tuesday morning, and my husband put him on speaker because his right hand was busy holding his left wrist against his chest.

“Unit 7 goes to Greg today,” Shane said. His voice had the flat, hurried sound it gets when he has already decided something and wants it over. “You can’t grip a wheel in that cast, Ben.”

Ben had slipped on the frosty ladder at the back of his trailer the night before, at the end of the fourteenth day of harvest.

Left wrist, snapped clean through. The urgent care doctor in Grafton had called it a textbook break.

Ben had driven that truck for nine seasons. He had never once missed a shift. “It’s my truck, Shane,” he said.

He was sitting on the edge of our couch in yesterday’s work shirt, gray in the face, the cast still wet-looking and white.

“It’s my company’s truck,” Shane said. “I’ve got eleven trucks on the contract and a daily quota to hit. I can’t carry a man who can’t drive. Greg’s got a license. Greg can start now.”

“Greg Pfeiffer?” “He needs the work.” Then the line went quiet, and I understood Shane had hung up without saying goodbye to his own brother.

I want to tell this the way it happened, and that means starting with how a sugar beet harvest works in the Red River Valley, for anyone who has never lived through one.

Every fall, from the end of September until the ground is done giving up beets, the whole valley rearranges itself.

Farmers lift the beets out of black dirt with big harvesters, and the beets have to move fast, before a hard freeze can damage them or a warm spell can start them rotting.

Trucks carry them from the field to the piling station, where a long conveyor called the piler stacks them into rows as long as a football field.

From those piles they go to the factory all winter, and the factory turns them into sugar.

That money is the winter for a lot of families. For us it was propane, the second half of the mortgage, the dentist for Addie, and the new transmission the pickup was going to need by January.

Shane Lund ran Lund Hauling, eleven trucks and a shop on the county road. He hired the family first and friends second.

Ben drove Unit 7, a white Kenworth with a hopper trailer, and the contract paid by the ton.

Unit 7 hauled about twenty-four tons a load. After Shane took out his share for fuel and insurance, the driver kept forty-one dollars a load.

A good shift was fourteen loads. A good harvest was a few thousand dollars we did not have any other way of making.

I should say plainly who I am. My name is Stephanie Lund, I was thirty-two that fall, and I’m a dental assistant at Dr.

Halvorson’s office in Grafton. I had married into the Lund family nine years before, and in all that time Shane and I had never had a real argument.

We had Christmas together. We had the Fourth. He made good ribs. That Tuesday morning I stood in my own kitchen and watched my husband stare at a phone that had gone dark.

“He can’t just do that,” Ben said finally. “He did,” I said. “It’s nine years.” “I know.” Dorothy came over before seven.